AFRICA, ASIA, AND EUROPE DID NOT PRODUCE THE RACES. UN-COLORING RACE, A BLOG BY JEFF MORTON

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Under The Throne of YAHWEH (The Obama-Media War)

All of what men do, every corruption, every conspiracy, every deliberate, calculated, manipulation of one another is all committed under the watchful eye of our Great, Omniscient, Creator who supplants JOY, and hope into the hearts of those who believe. the godless scurry to and fro for power, wealth, and vanity! Who seeks vanity?

Jeremiah 16:19-20
Yahweh, my strength, and my stronghold, and my refuge in the day of
affliction, to you shall the nations come from the ends of the earth,
and shall say, Our fathers have inherited nothing but lies, [even]
vanity and things in which there is no profit. Shall a man make to himself gods, which yet are no gods?

Revolutions
are rarely undone from the outside. Mostly they come apart from the
inside as the forty thieves descend into petty squabbling over the loot.

The
loot comes in different forms, but at its core it is always power. It
may be the power to kill or to steal. It may be the power to claim a
nice piece of real estate or to send a million people off to their
deaths. The scale of it will occupy historians and shock the people of
the future who leaf through the history books and walk through the
silent museums, but it is all of one piece. The purpose of power, as a
fellow in a little book by George Orwell once said, is power.

The
quarrel between Obama and the Media is largely a lovers' quarrel, but
the love is only there on one side. The media made Obama what he is. But
what he is, among many other things, is a control freak spawned by a
political ideology that distrusts everyone and consolidates power at all
cost.

The media loved Obama, but it discovered early on that he
did not love it back. Instead of basking in the adoration of the Candy
Crowleys and the Anderson Coopers and the massive corporate machines
behind them, the love child of every liberal fantasy shut them out,
rigidly controlled their access and ruthlessly punished unauthorized
conversations with the press.

The media had made Obama into a tin
god, but were constantly suspected of heresy. Instead of being rewarded
for their loyalty, they were kept at arm's length.

Obama Inc.
knew that their biggest asset was the narrative. A close study of
Obama's qualifications or accomplishments would have given no
conceivable reason for voting for him. The only thing he brought to the
table was race and even in this he was less qualified than most of the
black men who had run for president.

The narrative was the
dearest treasure of Obama Inc. It was the one thing that its cronies
protected. The economy could tank, wars could be lost and an asteroid
could smack into the Pacific Ocean and none of it mattered nearly as
much as the golden narrative. They didn't trust anyone with it including
the media.

The media these days doesn't have much. Its numbers
are bad in every medium from the tube to the inky pages of newsprint to
the crackling AM radio waves. It isn't very profitable. Often it's a
dead weight. But it wields a great deal of institutional power. The New
York Times and CNN may both be dogs when it comes to the balance sheets,
but owning either one gives you an impressive amount of heft in the
national dialogue; though not as much as working for one of them does.

Power
is all that the media has. Its power is projected in a fairly narrow
circle. Fewer people are reading, watching and listening to it, so its
circle becomes more incestuous. Everyone has learned to act like a
member of the D.C. press corps, interpreting events through the lens of
old West Wing episodes. The resulting noise reaches fewer people, but
helps form the shaky consensus on which the institutional power of the
media stands.

In its dying hour, the media used that power to
ensure the double coronation of a corrupt Chicago politician with a
facility for mimicking speech patterns. And that politician rewarded it
by trying to bypass it and set up his own media.

Obama's vision
of the proper place of the media isn't just at his feet, but under his
control. Instead of dealing with the media, he has tried to cut it out
of the loop by putting a larger emphasis on social media and developing
narratives through think-tanks and media influencing groups. It was a
power struggle that the media was initially baffled by. It had held out
an ice cream cone to the little boy, only to have the little boy kick it
in the shin, grab the ice cream cone and run away.

For
years the media had groused about a lack of transparency, the
unprecedented prosecution of whistleblowers and the hostile relationship
between Obama Inc's minions and many reporters. The grousing was
usually understated. It could be mentioned offhand, but not too loudly.
When Bob Woodward made the mistake of speaking his mind, he was swiftly
punished for it by the avatars of the post-media media, while the old
media sat silently and watched the show.

But then Obama pushed
its limits by invading the sanctum of the Associated Press. It was one
thing when the administration was targeting whistleblowers, but quite
another when the media's power became part of the collateral damage.

The
week of scandals was the media reminding Obama that his smooth ride had
been provided by them and that the ride could get very bumpy if his
media ponies decide to take the back road to Benghazigate or drop by the
IRS headquarters. It's a bluff, of course. The day may come when the
media takes Obama out back and disposes of him so that the new messiah,
perhaps in a pantsuit, can ascend the old Camelot throne, but that day
isn't here yet.

Scandal week was a game of chicken between Obama
and the media to see who would blink first. Would Obama decide to
respect the institutional power of the media or would be consider
pushing forward until the media blinked. A brief history of Obama Inc.
suggests that he will keep pushing on. Obama backs down from Muslim
terrorists and Russian government thugs, but not from Americans.

Like
most cowards, Obama only attacks those he knows won't fight back. And
the only people who won't fight back are either helpless or bound by
their politics not to resist the liberal messiah.

Obama knows
that the media does not dare harm a hair on the head of the liberal
agenda. And he made certain to appoint a Vice President whom no one in
their right mind would want to see take over. Until 2016, it's Hussein
or the highway. The media has shown that it can hamstring him even when
the coverage is only mild. It is quite capable of turning up the
temperature to boiling, though not without a civil war with Media
Matters, Think Progress and a chunk of the liberal new media.

The
media is a prisoner of its own ideology. It can't hit Obama too hard...
yet. Not until they're making the case that Hillary will do a better
job of governing than this inexperienced tyro did. Having abandoned any
professional integrity years ago, it would be too late for most of the
media to reclaim it now. Even in the name of its own institutional
power.

This is the process by which leftists have collaborated in
their own purges. It is why wealthy leftists financed revolutions that
would rob them. The media's wealth is in its institutional power and it
is being forced to accede to the redistribution of that influence.

Obama
is not interested in an independent media, even if it is biased his own
way. Leftists are great centralizers. They seize power by consolidating
it under their control. The Democratic Party is struggling as Obama's
OFA Super PAC loots their fundraising operations. Why does Obama need a
Super PAC? Because it gives him another source of personal power while
diminishing the power of established institutions. And the news media is
just one more established institution for the children of the
counterculture to beat to death with its own microphones.

The
media is trying to make a statement about boundaries, but it lacks
commitment. Even as it halfheartedly, though for the first time, covers
actual misconduct by Obama Inc. with that smidgen of outrage which
usually only creeps into its own when reporting on the dreaded (R's), it
undermines its own show of force by discussing how quickly Obama will
be able to get over the hump and back to his agenda. The media's
blackmail of the man listening to its phone calls and scanning through
its emails lacks conviction.

Obama needs the media, but the media
needs him more. It doesn't need him for practical reasons, but for
emotional reasons. It needs to believe that its corrupt institutional
power has been put at the service of a higher purpose and a higher
calling. It needs to believe this all the more as the ratings drop, the
papers go unsold and the radio stations fill up with the voices of
conservative talk show hosts. That emotional need makes the media the
prisoner of this administration.

On
his end, Obama has a practical need for the media, but no emotional
need. Interviews, even of the softball media kind, challenge his
control. They question him and Obama does not like being questioned.
While media figures see themselves as serving a meaningful liberalizing
institution, he sees them as carriers of a narrative. A narrative that
can just as easily be carried anywhere else.

When Obama looks at
the media, he doesn't see Walter Cronkite, he sees a bunch of radios,
televisions and newspapers; which these days are little more than
footnotes for the internet. There is nothing special about that to him
or his cronies. Just mediums that distort his message because he doesn't
control them. And so Obama chooses to control every medium he uses.

The
Obama media war is good clean fun, but it's also a brief skirmish.
Neither side can afford to extend the battle for very long. For the
media the scandals will vanish as soon as they hear magic words like
"Gun Control" or "Illegal Alien Amnesty". And for Obama, the war will
end when one side or the other blinks.

Daniel
Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger and a Shillman
Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.